A rather large number of them are of this ilk; pretty post-war depictions of landscapes and towns courtesy of British Railways.

Claude Buckle, 1952, est. £100-200.

Although I do quite like the way it equates history with a bad pong. That’s the visit of Charles I, by the way.

I do have one gripe about the auction, though, which is that not very much effort has been put into ascribing dates, or even artists to the posters. Take the Salisbury smell, above. That’s down in the catalogue as being Anonymous, but it took me all of two minutes on Google to discover the date, and that it’s by Claude Buckle. A piece of information you’d think might increase its value, and hence the auctioneer’s commission. And all of the dates on here are ones that I have found, not them. Poor show.

But I mustn’t grumble too much. For a change, there are actually a few nifty bits of graphic design in amongst the conventional pretties. This example is actually pre-war.

Sav, est. £80-120

I’d like to think that the Sav is short for Savignac, but as I can find another, 1946, railway poster with the same signature but not of anything like the same quality, I am inclined to suspect not.

This next, while good design, is probably a bit too effective for most people’s taste.

Anonymous, est. £80-120

Somewhere in the back of my mind is a feeling that I used to know who that poster was by, and I think it’s Pat Keely, while the internet is hinting that it might be by Leonard Cusden. But if anyone out there knows better, please do say.

This Hans Unger is considerably cheerier, and a great deal more desirable.

Hans Unger, 1962, est. £50-80

I have just been to that London by train; this is how you may imagine me travelling. Including the hat.

While this is rather good of its kind too.

Anonymous, 1957, est. £80-120.

As has been the case with the last few railway auctions I’ve looked at, there are also a handful of World War Two posters included, of which this is my favourite.

Anonymous, est. £150-300.

It looks a bit like a Beverley Pick, although I have some nagging memory that either Henrion or Zero did a lot of the Wrens advertising at the time. Still, it’s a World War Two poster, so the chances are that we’ll never know for sure.

And finally, a conundrum, in the form of an entirely new (to me) poster for Ramsgate.

Anonymous, 1961, est. £80-120.

Surely this has to be Chapter Four of Alan Durman’s Ramsgate romance, with the baby all grown up and playing. And Mrs Ramsgate has bought herself a new swimsuit at last.

Tantalisingly, the NRM don’t give an artist for their copy of the poster, but the date is 1961, two years after Durman’s couple were holding their baby up in the surf. How can it be anything else?

And even if it isn’t, it’s still a bargain at that estimate. What are you waiting for?

The recent announcement from the British Postal Museum and Archive announcing that they have upgraded their online catalogue may not have been the most retweeted 140 characters in the history of Twitter. But the news is actually quite exciting.

On an entirely practical level the images are now larger than a postage stamp. The particular joy of this is that I can now get a proper look at the van posters, which are some of my favourite things in the world.

I wonder if any of these have survived outside of the BPMA’s collections? I’ve never come across one out in the wild.

More than that, a whole lot of new material also seems to have been catalogued for the first time. I had no idea that Barbara Jones had ever designed a poster for the GPO, but the evidence is there in full colour.

It’s from 1956, since you ask.

In addition, for the first time the catalogue now includes some Post Office Savings Bank posters. This is clearly still a work in progress as, currently, there’s nothing in there by Daphne Padden and she did some of her best work for the POSB.

What is in there, though, when you search for POSB posters, is a lot of work by Stan Krol, quite a bit of which I’ve never seen before.

With both posters and artwork included.

All of which is a salutary reminder. It’s not just that archives themselves are important, but also the way they are arranged and made accessible. Because both of these things can change the way we think about the past.

Morever, in the new, exciting BPMA catalogue, the results also come up differently. Back in the day, the archive used to sort the results, so that the artwork would come up first, then the posters. So I would skip through the artwork, and just look at the posters instead.

But now the two come up intermingled, which means that I don’t miss items like this Tom Eckersley internal poster, which shows as artwork but not as finished poster.

All of which will, I am sure, make other differences to the way I think as well, even if I I don’t entirely know what the results will be yet. Watch this space.

The biggest change of all, of course, is just the fact that online archives exist in the first place. This blog, and I’m sure much else besides, simply wouldn’t exist without them.

If I had to travel from London to York and all points in between simply to see posters, it’s just not going to happen without a private income or a job that is prepared to pay for me to do it. Neither of which things exist. So online archives enable me, and many many other people, to think more widely and to see more points of reference. But there is another more subtle benefit too, which is that they also allow people like me to choose.

Prior to this, the only way I would have been able to see any GPO posters would have been either in auction catalogues, or in books. In each case, the posters would have been pre-selected. But give me an archive and a computer, and I am at liberty to decide which items I find interesting. So, perhaps, I am less likely to fall in with the accepted canon of ‘good’ posters as a result, and history ends up being written slightly differently. Which is clearly a good thing.

So hurrah for the lovely new BPMA catalogue and archives in general.

But wonderful as all of this is, we mustn’t let this blind us to the fact that not everything is archived. This may sound like a truism but it’s actually a really important point, and it’s something I think about a lot in connection with Daphne Padden.

Her work has been massively under-recognised over the years, and her profile still isn’t as high as it should be. Now there were plenty of reasons for this – and being a woman working on the outskirts of London must have played a considerable part. But a big part of it has to be because she just worked for the wrong people.

Railway posters were sold and collected when they were produced, and nowadays they are traded at auction, reproduced in books and as fridge magnets, and kept in a socking great archive in York (now there’s an interface that could still do with taking a long hard look at itself). But she only ever did a few of those.

Instead her main customer were the coach companies. And where is the coach archive, I hear you ask? Well exactly.

There isn’t a collection of these anywhere; hardly any survive and it’s possible that the most comprehensive selection (now that the Malcolm Guest collection got sold) is in our spare room. Which is ridiculous.

And because my spare room doesn’t have an archivist or – more to the point – doesn’t actually contain more than a couple of dozen coach posters when hundreds were produced, people don’t know about these designs. So they don’t get reproduced in books, or as fridge magnets, and in the end they disappear from view.

Along with the designers, like Daphne Padden, who produced them.

So while we can have a lot of fun with the archives that are there, it’s always worth using them with half a mind to the ones that don’t exist.

Christmas is madness in so many ways, but one of them is that there is far too much television on to take in all at once. So one of the series that Mr Crownfolio and I stashed away to watch later, was The Home That 2 Built, which is a history of makeover and suchlike programming on BBC2.

We’ve also been watching it in the wrong order, starting with the last programme, about the 90s and 00s. This is because in my past life before this blog, back in the late 90s, I used to make exactly this kind of show.

So I knew there would be a few familiar things in there, but I really wasn’t prepared for how much I recognised. It was like drowning and watching an entire period of my life flash before my eyes as I went under, programme after programme, episode after episode.

So, fast forward a couple of weeks, and we finally get round to watching the first programme, about the 1960s. This time I really wasn’t anticipating any kind of surprises, but my goodness there was one this time too. Half way through, in a short piece of black and white film, a woman demonstrates how she has turned a dishwasher into an owl.

‘That’s Barbara Jones,’ said Mr Crownfolio.

He thought he was being flippant, but you know what? He was absolutely right. There was Barbara Jones. On our television.

It’s a good owl, too.

If you want to watch it for yourself, this episode is on Youtube, and you can find it about 27 minutes in.

But I do have to warn you, there’s a lot of Laurence Llewelyn Bowen to wade through on the way. For which I do have to apologise. It is after all, in a small way, my fault.

You’d think we’d all be winding down for Christmas by now, but not in poster world, oh no. We may be almost half way througb December, but there are still two auctions on the horizon. The first is Swann, whose next auction is on 17th December. Fortunately for my Christmas relaxation, this time they are selling two turn of the century collections. So if you want to see a lot of high quality American and French art nouveau, you know where to go, but that’s all I am going to say on here.

The day before this, however, is the Onslows winter auction, and this is a whole other story. Or several other stories in fact.

Some of these tales we know already. It is – just in case you hadn’t noticed – one hundred years since the start of World War One, and like every other auction with any self-respect this year, Onslows is celebrating by selling a lot of recruiting posters. For some reason, these also bring a whole lot of Second World War posters travelling in their wake, and this sale is no exception.

This is probably my favourite, partly because I’ve never seen it before and partly because I keep thinking it wants me to get rid of iron dumps.

Anon, est. £40-50

I’m easily amused, me. And I do also like the typography, and the etc. etc at the end.

However, I do worry sometimes that this blog can get a bit jaded; I’ve already written about so many World War Two posters one way or another that perhaps I don’t get excited enough when they come up for auction. So I feel duty bound to say that there is also a good Dig for Victory poster too.

Anon, 1941, est. £1,000-1,500

There’s also yet another copy of Keep Calm and Carry On, but I don’t really need to show you a picture of that, do I. After all, it doesn’t actually look any different to any of the reproductions.

The rest, though, aren’t actually that inspiring when I go back to look at them again. So perhaps I am not quite so world-weary yet.

Story two, about which I am not so much jaded as bemused, consists of a group of Shell educational posters. Every so often I spy these in an auction and say that I have no idea what they are worth. This is still true, but it now seems as though my confusion has spread to the auction houses as well. Onslows is offering one group of 21 posters in middling condition for £150-200, some smaller groups of posters for £50-80 and then this solo poster for a bit more even though it is just one.

Walter Hoyle, 1963, est. £70-100.

If anybody feels like writing in and explaining the economics of Shell educational posters to me, along with some reasons why, I’d be very grateful. From what I can see on eBay, the going rate seems to be £20-30 a go if they are in good condition, with a few exceptions, but please feel free to disagree. I do have a vested interest in this, as recent explorations have revealed that we seem to have dozens of them, with many multiples. So if theres a county you particularly want, please let me know.

The main excitement though is neither of these but a positively extravagent quantity of GPO posters.

Elizabeth Moore, 1963, est. £100-150

The vast majority are of this type, art paintings of places, commissioned by the GPO to make us address letters correctly and intended, even at the time, to be collectable objects. I offer you the highly typical one above mainly because it shows Worcester, the ancestral Crownfolio homeland.

Generally, I’m not wild about these, even when it’s an artist of the calibre of John Minton.

John Minton, 1957, est. £50-100

However this collection (which I think was found as a single in a provincial auction by someone who is going to do quite well out of it all) is so huge that it includes some which are entirely new to me and I also rather like.

Peter Edwards, 1960, est. £100-150

Robert Scanlan, 1965, est. £70-100

I can’t tell you anything about either of these artists, but the posters are great, and there are two more equally good Robert Scanlan’s in the sale as well as that one.

But that’s not all, either, there are also a smaller number of commercial GPO posters too. We’ve seen this Eckersley before.

Tom Eckersley, 1957, est. £200-300

Its even-more-frequently reproduced dog companion is also for sale.

But I have never seen this Manfred Reiss anywhere.

Manfred Reiss, 1955, est. £200-300

Crownfolio says that’s a bit freaky.

And there’s also these two as well.

G. Parkinson, 1955, est. £100-150

Barnett Freedman, 1938, est. £80-120

I shall watch all of that go past with interest.

Railway posters also make up a reasonable showing, although they are predominantly pre-war and quite a conventional bunch, while London Transport material is very thin on the ground indeed. Although if you like this bus poster, you will be pleased to hear that it is also available in blue.

But right now, as someone rather brilliantly defined it on Twitter, it’s the brief and shining season between the bumper Christmas Radio Times coming out and the realisation that there’s nothing you want to watch in there at all.

So to celebrate, some Christmas covers from the past. When graphic design was much, much better.

That one’s Hans Unger, not unsurprisingly. I can’t tell you who the next two are by, but the date from 1965 and 1966 respectively.

I particularly like the latter one, and wouldn’t mind finding the original artwork under the tree, should someone happen to have it lying around.

But things were good before the war too – take this McKnight Kauffer from 1926. As I am sure many of you would like to.

For those of you who would like to do a proper trawl, the full Flickr set is here. But be warned, there are more than a thousand photos.

And finally can I note that this blog post was produced without any co-operation at all from my ‘y’ key, so apologies for any typos.

This was meant to be a Friday afternoon treat, but got unavoidably delayed. Still, these four posters are delightful any day.

These first two for the GPO, I have never seen before, and they don’t seem to be in the BPMA archive either. While this one I have no idea about at all, except that the colours are particularly lovely.

Finally, this one has been on the blog a few times before, but until now I had no idea that it was by Patrick Tilley.

The BPMA didn’t know that either, but you’ll be pleased to know that they do now.

And as ever, many thanks to Patrick Tilley for allowing me to share these with you.